Britain's peace movement must step up to stop the government racing into a “potentially disastrous” war in Syria, the Communist Party’s political committee heard on Wednesday night.

Ben Chacko told the committee that despite a lack of evidence to back up claims relating to the alleged chemical weapons attack on Douma, the media were showing “no restraint” — for example attributing claims of the number of deaths and injuries to the World Health Organisation when the WHO itself said its figures had been provided by rebel groups on the ground.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was right to push for a parliamentary vote, Mr Chacko said, but the outcome of such a vote was far from certain given the number of reckless warmongers on the party’s back benches.

“But this will provide a breathing space for the anti-war movement to rally against the nightmare possibility of direct military conflict between US and Russian forces.”

Mr Chacko drew comparisons between the rush to judgement on Syria and the increasingly farcical claims around the alleged poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

“It is testament to the total indifference of the mainstream media to investigating the truth that exposing the motives and inconsistencies in government claims has been left largely to social media and blogs like that of former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, as well as some sharp articles in the Morning Star such as Kenny Coyle’s exposé of the media’s go-to chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who turns out to head up a firm selling gas masks to the MoD,” he said.